NASA’s Perseverance rover has just dropped its latest sample into Jezero Crater. The sealed tubes will now wait for many years before, perhaps, being recovered.
The ” first sample drop on another world » is now complete.
An emergency depot
This is one of the core elements of Perseverance’s mission. For many months, the rover has been collecting samples from rocks considered to be ” scientifically important by the teams in charge of the mission. While some remain inside the rover, others sit on the Martian surface and are now a vast repository located in Jezero Crater. This area was home to a river flowing into a vast lake billions of years ago, providing an environment conducive to the emergence of microbial life. Analysis of the samples could allow scientists to unravel this mystery.
” The titanium tubes were deposited on the surface in an intricate zigzag pattern, with each sample separated approximately 5 to 15 meters from each other so that they could be safely retrieved “, explains the American space agency. The depot is a back-up solution in the event that Perseverance is unable, due to a breakdown for example, to deliver the tubes it is transporting to the right port during its recovery mission.
The recovery mission will be very complex
Indeed, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working on a highly complex mission, called Mars Sample Return, to recover the samples to bring them to our planet. This involves Perseverance bringing the tubes to a rocket-equipped platform to send them into orbit, where a European spacecraft will pick them up to take them to Earth.
In the meantime, however, the rover may no longer be able to perform this step. In this case, two helicopters similar to Ingenuity will be there to pick up the samples that Perseverance has just placed on the ground, the location of each of them having been carefully mapped. NASA currently estimates that the sample retrieval lander, developed by Lockheed Martin, will land no earlier than 2028 and that the samples will not arrive on Earth until at least 2033.
Sources: The Verge, NASA
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